Arthur Miller: A BiographyArthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City.
His father, Isidore Miller, had emigrated from Poland at age 6 and cultivated
a successful garment business despite a limited education. His mother
was a first generation American, whose family was also from Poland.
Miller was the middle child with an older brother, Kermit, and a younger
sister, Joan. As a child, his mother took him to plays on Broadway.
He liked the plays and the short movies that were available, but his favorite
activity was sports. After the fall of the economy, his family had
to move from their large house in Harlem to a smaller one in Brooklyn.
These experiences would become major themes in his plays and movie scripts.

Miller graduated from high school in 1932 during the height of the Depression.
He had to take various jobs, including driving a truck and working in an
auto parts warehouse to save for college tuition. It took him two
years to save enough money to enroll in the University of Michigan as a
journalism student. Those two years also introduced him to the anti-Semitism
and to the awareness that drama and writing could open people to the truths
of the world around them. He changed majors after enrolling in a
playwriting course and winning a University prize for his first play, They
Too Rise. He won more awards, and upon graduating went back to
New York, where he joined the Federal Theatre Project and supported himself
by writing radio scripts. He turned down an offer from a major film company
because he felt writing for stage would give him more freedom to choose
his subject matter.

In the 1940ís he had two major plays, All My Sons and Death
of a Salesman, produced on Broadway. These plays explored the relationship
between father and son, as well as American values. By the end of
WWII, the horror of the Holocaust was surfacing. By the 1950ís, another
kind of scapegoat made its way to the public's attention: communists.

Arthur Miller's writing is influenced by the immense historical events
of his lifetime: two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the
growth of nuclear weapons, the McCarthy hearings, the fall of the Soviet
Union, and the AIDS epidemic. But he does not write mere history.
Miller writes about ordinary people struggling in a world changed by events
that seem to leave them without a spiritual base. Miller is no recluse.
He has lived and worked among people and formed close associations.

No biography of Miller would be complete without mention of his close
relationship with Elia Kazan, who directed All My Sons, Death
of a Salesman and After the Fall. Their friendship went beyond
professional ties. But their relationship struggled to survive Kazan's
cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee and his naming
of ten other writers and directors from Hollywood as communists.
Miller and Kazan did not speak for ten years.
Miller married three times. In 1940, he married his college sweetheart
Mary Slattery, with whom he had a daughter and a son. After their divorce,
he later married Marilyn Monroe and wrote a movie, The Misfits,
for her. When she committed suicide, they were already divorced.
His last wife, Inge Morath, a professional photographer, with whom he had
two more children, died in 2002. Miller himself died on February
10th,
2005.

Synopsis"After the Fall" intimates that the original fall from Eden is recapitulated
by each individual through the Fall into consciousness and thus into choice. Stephen Barker (Cambridge 237)

After the Fall is a memory play. Quentin begins speaking
to someone offstage. Perhaps he speaks to the audience, perhaps to an invisible
friend or therapist. What becomes clear is this: everything that
happens onstage is in Quentin's mind; we see the other characters from
his point of view. Something has happened to this man to force him
into a reflective state of being. He is a lawyer whose primary client
is himself. Quentin investigates how things have turned out the way they
have from his own perception of truth. People from his past--wives,
lovers, clients, and friends--appear and fade away as Quentin remembers
past encounters. He wanted to do good in life, to love and be loved.
But his first two marriages ended in divorce and he betrayed a friend.
As the play moves forward and backward in time, Quentin acknowledges his
own capacity for cruelty and murder--not the physical taking of anotherís
life but the murder of love, his own as well as the love of others.

The Theme of DenialAn overriding theme in After the Fall is denial. Quentin
learns about denial from considering the impact of the Holocaust.
This brings him to the realization that he must face the many ways he has
justified or ignored his complicity in the failure of his marriage to Louise
and the death of Maggie. He does not want to look at the truth and
yet once he begins, he sees the layers of denial and is compelled to dig
deeper.

Production HistoryAfter the Fall was first produced in 1964 for the Lincoln Center,
which was to be home for a new National Theatre. Because the new
theatre was not yet built it premiered at the ANTA- Washington Square Theatre.
It was designed for a thrust stage similar to the Alley Theatre's Neuhaus
stage. The set consisted of risers and a background dominated by
a watch tower reminiscent of a concentration camp. It had a
three-month rehearsal period, during which Miller made many rewrites of
the script. The touring show design did away with the watchtower and had
higher risers with steps that formed a spiral. The background consisted
of a barbed wire spiral.

Influences on Miller in writing After the Fall

The Great DepressionFrom the roaring 20's when jazz and good times rolled, America entered
the 30's with a whimper:

Wall Street's Great Crash of 1929 did not "cause" the decade of the
Great Depression that followed...The Crash was a symptom of the economyís
serious disease...After the Crash the economy was paralyzed. In one year
1,300 banks failed. (Davis 271)

There was no insurance on the money lost and as people lost their savings,
salaries were halved and cut again, jobs were lost as businesses were forced
to close, and people lined the streets waiting for handouts of food.
The great wheat belt of mid America was stricken by a drought and farmers
lost their land and migrated to California in search of jobs. Many
lost hope and the effects of the Depression scarred at least two generations
of Americans. They would never quite trust good times again.

Miller's father lost his fortune in 1929 but business had been waning
for the family company for the past year, and in 1928 the Millers lost
their home and moved from a wealthy section of Harlem to a small house
in a lower income neighborhood in Brooklyn. Miller's mother blames her
husband for his lack of foresight. Miller has to take a job right
after graduating from high school. Miller writes of that experience in
Timebends:

By 1936, in my junior year, I had had more than a taste of life at
the bottom, and there was no room for sentimentality there...The bathos
of the popular songs and plays of the day seemly weirdly misplaced even
at the time. A scene in Steinbeckís The Grapes of Wrath, in which
a storekeeper lets a hungry family keep a ten-cent loaf of bread without
paying for it, was an amazing departure from any reality I had experienced.

The United States drops the first Atomic BombIn 1945, President Harry S. Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima,
killing 80,000 people and injuring another 100,000 with the newly developed
Atomic Bomb. Three days later, another bomb is dropped on Nagasaki.
These bombs were developed in secret during the early 1940ís in Los Alamos,
New Mexico.

Miller wrote in Timebends that he had been waiting for 15 years
to write about Hiroshima. He wanted to write a play that examined
how the scientist who invented the Bomb felt about what they had created.
He visited with Hans Bethe, the designer of the lens that caused the bomb
to detonate. Bethe struggled with the consequences of the bombís use.
He had not wanted it to be used against people, but felt that its creation
was inevitable and wanted to forestall Germanyís development of atomic
power. Later Miller would visit Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist
on the Manhattan Project.
Miller comes away from the visits asking these questions:

Why was one responsible if one had no evil intentions?

But if one had no evil intention, then where did the evil come from?

Where is the heart of evil if not within us?

It was emphatically not mere blame or guilt I was interested in but
the scientistís connection, or the absence of it, with his own life.
(Timebends, 519)

The HolocaustBy the end of WWII America and the world learned that over 6 million
Jews had been killed by the Nazi government. Most of these victims
died in the concentration camps. Millions more homosexuals, Eastern Europeans
and Gypsies were also killed. Though is it believed that President
Roosevelt knew of the extermination camps and the atrocities it was not
until after the war that Americans began to learn of the Holocaust and
the loss of human decency that made it possible.

In 1960, fifteen years after the war, Miller and Inge Morath visited
Mauthausen concentration camp. He would be profoundly affected by
what he saw and heard. He then traveled to Frankfurt, Germany where he
had been commissioned by the New York Herald Tribune as a correspondent.
He attended the war crime trials of several guards from the camps.
Accounts of his impressions can be read in Timebends or in the articles
that he wrote during that time.

Historian Milton Meltzer writes books for young people about the Holocaust.
Check the resource page
for one title, or your local library for other titles.
He does not have a web page.

House Un-American Activities CommitteeBeginning in the late forties and well into the fifties, the HUAC was
headed by Joseph McCarthy. Historian Kenneth C. Davis writes in his
book, Donít Know Much About History:

In the 1950ís "McCarthyism" meant a brave, patriotic stand against
Communism. It had the support of the media and the American people.
Now it has come to mean a smear campaign of groundless accusations from
which the accused cannot escape, because professions of innocence become
admission of guilt and only confessions are accepted. Many who came before
McCarthy, as well as many who testified before the powerful House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUCA), were willing to point fingers at others to
save their own careers and reputations. (326)

Another historian of the 50's, David Halberstam, writes that McCarthyism
crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous
new era:

He took people who were at the worst, guilty of political naïveté
(innocence, gullibility) and accused them of treason. He set out
to do the unthinkable, and it turned out to be surprisingly thinkable.
(26)

Miller's friend and collaborator, Elia Kazan had belonged to organizations
with close ties to the communist party. Kazan may even have belonged
to the party for a time. When Kazan decided to name names to HUAC, Miller
withdrew from him. Kazan held the position that he was in the height
of his creative life and he had come to hate the communist party, as did
many of those he named. The fact that McCarthy was forcing him to name
names against his will was, he felt, justifiable because the people he
named were all known members of the communist party. Miller understood
the longing Kazan had for fulfilling his artistic potential but he couldnít
accept the price that Kazanís testimony was going to force on those he
named.

Later Miller would be called on to name names. He refused and
was held in contempt of Congress in 1956. In 1957, the United States
Court of Appeals overturned his conviction. But during that time
his passport was revoked and his career hit a low point. It was in
this period that Miller divorced his first wife and married Marilyn Monroe.

Love & MarriageMarriage is a central theme in After the Fall. Miller was married
three times and had four children by two of his wives. Miller valued
marriage and wanted, like Quentin, to understand how his first two marriages
failed. Marilyn Monroe was perhaps his most famous wife.
She was a star beyond measure. Her every move was scrutinized.

Albert CamusIn 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for his novel, The Fall.
The story concerns a lawyer who witnesses a tragic event and does nothing
to intervene. Camus was greatly influenced by feeling displaced throughout
his life, which he dedicated to a search for his own truth. He believed
that is all we can give one another--truth from our own perspective.
He is frequently identified as one of the existential writers of the post
WWII years.

Miller was deeply concerned with the role of denial or amnesia in American
Culture. He wanted to write a story that would capture the universality
of the human cruelty as seen in everyday life, he wrote:

...the unstated question posed in The Fall was not how to
live with a bad conscience --but how to find out why one went to another's
rescue only to help in his defeat by collaborating in obscuring reality
from his eyes. This is the book of an observer. I wanted to write
about the participants in such a catastrophe, the humiliated defendants.
As all of us are. (Timebends 521)

Quentin's Timeline- The present is October 1963.
- Quentin was born in 1920, so heís currently 43.
- Quentin and Louise married in 1946 and divorced in 1956.
- Louise was born in 1924.
- Quentin and Maggie were married from 1956-1961.
- Maggie was born in 1926, so sheís 36 at the time of her death in
August 1962.
- Quentin quits firm September 1962.
- Quentin meets Holga in June 1963.
- Holga was born in 1926, so sheís 37 in the play.
- Quentin first meets Felice in 1961.

ActivitiesThe timeline of After the Fall begins when Quentin is born in
1920. In 1920, Miller was five years old. It is from this age
that many people can remember back to. So Quentin's lifespan in the
play is related to Millerís memory.
1. Have students make a timeline of their own lives and the major events
that they can remember. Then have them make a list of major historical
events during that time frame. They could also make a collage with
family photos or photographs of themselves since birth.
2. Discussion Prompts:

What does history teach us?

What does history have to do with After the Fall?

Can you find some of these events discussed or dramatized?

Additional Plays, Movies, and Novels with themes of
IntrospectionNot I by Samuel Beckett
A short film about an elderly woman who speaks after a lifetime
of silences. Only her lips are exposed.
www.themodernword.com/beckett/bof_not_i.html

Davis, Kenneth C. Don't Know Much About History: Everything You Need
toKnow About History But Never Learned. New York: Crown, 1990.
(A concise overview of history and its consequences. Easy to read.)

Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard, 1993.
(The definitive book on the 1950ís. Everything from politics to poodle
skirts and rock and roll.)

Meltzer, Milton. Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust.
New York: Harper Collins, 1976.
(Milton Melzer has written over 50 titles, many for young students.
He is a wonderful historian. Never to Forget is filled with letters
and stories of people whose lives were suddenly turned upside down by the
rule of slander and fear and hatred. He also has titles that relate to
other issues covered in this guide.)

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: a Life. New York: Grove, 1987.
(Millerís autobiography is packed with stories and commentary on his
writing and the people he met on the way to becoming one of Americaís most
respected playwrights.)

Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of
Arthur Miller. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
(Focuses on a recurrent theme in Millerís work.)